GENERAL NEWS ITEMS

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2255, 24 March 1921, Page 4

GENERAL NEWS ITEMS

Three small boys, on being turned. away from a house at Addlestone without payment for carol singing, pushed over and smashed a garden vase, valued at £3. A similar vase had been smashed by another carol party on the previous evening. The hoys were each fined 2s (id, and ordered to pay £1 each for damage. Thousands gathered in front of the Town Hall, Sunderland, to observe the local custom of welcoming the New Year on the Town Hall clock striking twelve. The clock chimed foufi quarters, and the crowd stood silent with hands outstretched to shake hands with friends as the hour struck, but, alas! the clock refused to strike. Its unexpected failure is regarded as a bad omen and caused general depression.

Officials of' the Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals of the American Methodist Episcopal Church denounce the contemptuous treatment accorded to the Protestant ministry by some cartoonists, writers, and actors. The "whole power of the Protestant churches, they say, should be used to bring about a reform on the stage and on the motion pictures. Protestant ministers are seldom represented except as “effiminale fools.”

An invasion of grasshoppers in the United States is expected from Canada. Canadian entomologists say the western provinces of Canada will be overrun with this plague in the spring, and that in Manitoba

alone as many as 3,000 grasshoppers’ eggs a square foot have been discovered. This threatened invasion is regarded with seriousness by agricultural experts, as there is no established method of preventing insect immigration, nor any scientific method of keeping the grasshoppers out of the country. Mr R.'G'obbe, of Feilding, concludes a letter to the Dominion: “During a recent visit to the States and Canada I interviewed some twenty of the leading Pacific Coast retail butchers, and found that every carcase of New Zealand lamb that they had handled the last few years bore Westfield lags, and this works is owned by Vesteys. Now Vesteys did not distribute this meat, but it was handled by Burns and Co., and Swift and Co., one of the dominant firms in the American Meat Trust. It would be of very great interest to the farming community if Mr Massey would give reasons for his continued allegiance to Vesteys.”

The apostle St. Luke was heard in unusual company recently. Mr C. P. Skerrett, K.C., in the cement company case, had been citing the opinions of numerous legal autho-

rities. To the great amusement of everyone, lie said lie might refer the court to the Gospel according to St. Luke, ,15th chapter, 28th verse. “One might think that the apostle had been writing on the Dominion Cement Company," remarked Mr Skerrett. “The passage is this: ‘For which of you intending to build a lower sitteth not down first and oomiteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it lest Imply, after he hath laid the foundation and is not able to finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him.” After serving more than fifteen years of a life sentence for a murder of which lie has always claimed to lie innocent, a young man named Hirschbrunner lias been released al Geneva, the real culprit having confessed. On the day following a popular masked ball at Soleure in May, 1906, the body of a vouug Swiss girl was found in I lie waitingroom of the railroad station, where she had been strangled to death. She had been seen the previous evening in the company of a young man dressed as a peasant woman. The description of her companion tallied with a costume worn by Ilirschburnner, and he was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment, entirely on circumstantial evidence. An elderly woman complained to the magistrate at Thames Police Court that there was a ghost at the house in which she lodged, and that it annoyed her. She said it had stopped her from sleeping for six months. “I don’t know who it is,’’ she said, “but it is a woman, and she uses the most awful language, and then it seems as if someone has put a battery on me, and it goes all over my head and works all through me.” “Do you think I ought to go and lay the ghost?” asked the magistrate. “Magistrates have no jurisdiction over gliosis at all. You could get into touch with several eminent men, however —Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, for instance—who take great interest in all these matters.” The applicant seemed much relieved, and said, “Oh, thank you, sir."